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I did vow to post every day, but I haven’t posted for the last three days! There’s no other reason than having had the busiest weekend I’ve had for a long, long time.

However to make up for the absence of posts over the weekend, to make myself feel better I will make 4 posts today.

This first post, I will link a great blog post by Liberal Conspiracy (a left-of-centre politics blog) which was brought to my attention by the Facebook group NO means NO.

The post is titled “The ‘perfect victim’ theory of rape, and how it’s reported“, which eloquently puts what I was actually planning to write in my blog post on Friday after a discussion with someone about the topic of blame when rape occurs. The press and the media will often reference to what the victim was wearing, or how she was behaving, or how much alcohol she had consumed prior to the attack, often to plant an idea in the reader’s mind about whether or not the victim was innocent, deserved it, or was even asking for it. Of course, we hear stories of “innocent” school girls in their conservative school uniforms being raped by gangs of men and we are shocked and horrified, but when a woman isso silly as to wear something revealing, or to have a few glasses of wine on a night out with her friends and then have the audacity to walk home alone, well, the sympathy of the public isn’t there.

In one disturbing incident, mentioned in the blog:

A recent news report in the Daily Mail blamed a 12-year old girl for being gang raped, reporting the defence statement that claimed she was a ‘Lolita’ who had accepted alcohol from the men who then raped her and her friend, as well as calling her a liar because she led them to believe she was older than she was.

These children were painted as ‘bad’ victims because they were out at night, drinking alcohol, and were ‘dressed provocatively’. Comments on the news stories painted the perpetrators of the rape as the victims of these girls, as they had been ‘led on’ and ‘tricked’ by girls who were dressed ‘sluttily’.

For those who don’t know such as myself, Lolita is a book written by Vladimir Nabokov in the 1950s which was banned – a story of a paedophile who was “both perpetrator and victim” to an obsession with a 12-year-old girl. The message by the protagonist in this story, which is repeated today in the media, is that a man cannot be blamed for his actions if a woman (or girl in this case) acts or behaves in a certain way which makes her desirable. Overlooking the fact that it’s illegal and immoral to have sex with a 12 year old at all because they are, effectively, children, this is still horribly, horribly wrong.

Essentially, if we assume the role of the rapist and tell the story as the Daily Mail did, it would read:

The girl accepted alcohol from me, so I had every right to have sex with her.

The girl was out at night, so I had every right to have sex with her.

The girl was dressed provocatively and we all know that means she wanted me to have sex with her.

The girl told me she was 16, so I had every right to have sex with her.

Obviously the thing I haven’t written there is:

The girl told me she wanted me to have sex with her, so I had every right to have sex with her.

…Because based on every account I have read, the girls didn’t agree or consent to sex, therefore it was uninvited, despite any of their previous actions. And uninvited sex is rape and rape is unforgivable, even if the victim did “lead their attackers on”.

The issue is that so many people in the world today hold a bizarre belief that men cannot be held to account for their actions if they are aroused. If we, as women, dare to intentionally or unintentionally arouse a man, what can we expect? Orgasms are not a basic human need for men – they can survive without them. If a man does become aroused and really craves “release”, masturbation exists at the next convenient occasions. Even if a woman does play an active role in making a man get an erection, it’s not her duty to provide him with an orgasm if she doesn’t want to and we, as humans, need to stop comparing the need to ejaculate as a necessity for a man in the same way as we would consider the need to eat or urinate, thus forgiving men the crime of rape because his victim left him with no choice.

She gave me 8 pints of water to drink, so I needed to pee.

She looked attractive to me, so I needed to have sex with her.

It doesn’t add up. Once people realise that men are capable of having an erection without then having the right to have sex with the nearest woman whether she wants it or not, then we’ll be one step closer to becoming a more victim-friendly culture.